Exhibition by Maya Carden on reuse and revival in the printmaking practice of the eighteenth-century artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
New Life in Old Plates opens at the Kemper Art Museum on Thursday, October 29, and it's a look at the printmaking of the eighteenth-century artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. If you're not familiar with him, Piranesi is best known for his detailed etchings of Rome—the ruins, the architecture, and the city as it stood in the 1700s. This particular show focuses on how he reused and revived his own plates, taking old work and reworking it into something new.
That's the core of the exhibition: reuse and revival. Instead of just printing a plate and putting it away, Piranesi would go back to them, altering the lines and changing the compositions. It's a glimpse into how a printmaker actually worked—the trial, the error, and the way a single image could evolve over time. If you've ever wondered about the process behind those old prints, this is a good place to see it laid out.
The exhibition is presented by Maya Carden, an Arthur Greenberg Curatorial Fellow at the Kemper Art Museum and a master's student in the Department of Art. It's a project coming out of the museum's own curatorial program, so it's a chance to see a scholar's take on Piranesi's practice rather than a broad retrospective. The focus stays tight on those plates and the way they were reworked, which makes it a more specific, focused show than a general survey of his life's work.
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It all opens on October 29 at the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis. If you've got an interest in printmaking or eighteenth-century art, it's worth a visit.
